Empty and Misleading Communication Takes over Organizations

A Theory of Bullshitting

In this paper, I will build on the idea that bullshitting is a social practice. In particular, I will develop the idea that some speech communities encourage the language game of bullshitting. By playing this language game, people can support (or in some cases undermine) their image and identity. This in turn can give rise to vicious or virtuous circles of bullshitting. I will argue that speech communities tend to encourage bullshitting when they have three characteristics: they are occupied by many conceptual entrepreneurs (who create a plentiful supply of bullshit), there is noisy ignorance (which creates a demand for bullshit) and there is permissive uncertainty (which creates an opportunity for bullshitting). Such speech communities give rise to the language game of bullshitting. This entails participants articulating misleading statements, processing them in a shallow way in order to maintain a sense of surface-level agreement between the players. When this game works smoothly, it can enhance the image and identity of the players. This often leads them to continue playing the bullshit game. It also reinforces the speech community which supports the game. However, when the game of bullshitting misfires, it can undermine the image and identity of players. If this happens, people are less likely to continue playing the game and are less likely to continue investing in the speech community (see Figure 1).

Speech community

The practice of bullshitting doesn’t come out of nowhere. It tends to be nurtured within particular speech communities. According to Gumperz (1968, p. 66) a speech community is ‘any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language usage’. Speech communities are built around shared linguistic repertoires, common linguistics norms, as well as shared linguistics competencies (Morgan, 2004). Speech communities can be geographically bounded groups such as residents of the Lower East Side in New York City (Labov, 1966), Philadelphia (Labov, 2001) or Belfast (Milroy & Milroy, 1992). Speech communities can also be national or even transnational such as speakers of specialist occupational languages (Bechky, 2003; Lave & Wenger, 1991) or administrative languages (Gumperz, 1968). Often these speech communities can be porous, with people moving in and out of them or engaging in ‘code switching’ so they can participate in a number of speech communities at once (Morgan, 2004). Often linguistic communities serve as ways of marking out group membership. Becoming part of that group means learning new ways of speaking. Gumperz pointed out that

elaborate linguistic etiquette and stylistic conventions that surround them, (mean) classical, liturgical, and administrative languages function somewhat like secret languages. Mastery of the conventions may be more important in gaining social success than substantive knowledge of the information dispensed through these languages. (Gumperz, 1968, p. 70)

In the contexts of organizations, becoming part of the speech community of middle management means learning a set of ‘elaborate linguistic etiquette and stylistic conventions’. Often that means learning how to bullshit.

Within a particular speech community, there are three core components which are likely to make bullshit more prevalent: conceptual entrepreneurs, noisy ignorance and permissive uncertainty.

The first characteristic of the speech community which is conducive to bullshitting is a large number of potential suppliers of bullshit. One important source of supply are conceptual entrepreneurs. These are actors with a stock of pre-packaged concepts they try to market to others. Many conceptual entrepreneurs operate in the management ideas industry. This is a sector made up of consultants, gurus, thought leaders, publishers and some academics (Sturdy, Heusinkveld, Reay, & Strang, 2018). The quality of actors operating in this industry tends to be extremely variable. A consequence is that some of the conceptual entrepreneurs seeking to peddle their wares in the management ideas industry are bullshit merchants. There are some sub-sectors of the management ideas industry where bullshit merchants are particularly concentrated. One is the ‘leadership industries’ (Pfeffer, 2015). This sub-sector includes many consultants, speakers, experts and advisors who create and distribute pseudo-scientific ideas about leadership (Alvesson & Spicer, 2013). A second sub-sector with a significant concentration of bullshit merchants is the ‘entrepreneurship industry’ (Hunt & Kiefer, 2017). This is the cluster of mentors, (pseudo-)entrepreneurs and thought leaders who push poorly evidenced, misleading and seductive ideas about entrepreneurship. Often their target is so-called ‘wantrepreneurs’ (Verbruggen & de Vos, 2019). In some cases, these ideas have been found to encourage vulnerable young people to adopt what are seductive but empty and misleading ideas about entrepreneurial success (Hartmann, Dahl Krabbe, & Spicer, 2019). For instance, Chen and Goldstein (forthcoming) followed a cohort of students at a mid-ranked North American university as they joined a campus-based business accelerator. Many put their lives on hold to launch start-ups. When these eventually failed, they often found themselves struggling to re-enter the mainstream labour market. They also tried to grapple with the ultimately meaningless and misleading advice about entrepreneurship they were exposed to during their time in the accelerator.

A second aspect of a speech community which can foster bullshitting is noisy ignorance. This is when actors lack knowledge about an issue yet still feel compelled to talk about it. It is not just the result of a lack of cognitive ability (however, it could be; Littrell et al., 2020). Rather, noisy ignorance is mainly due to a lack of understanding or experience concerning the issues being discussed. Often that ignorance has been strategically cultivated (McGoey, 2012). In some other cases, actors deliberately avoid gathering information or knowledge about an issue. In other cases, noisy ignorance is created by knowledge asymmetries where one party knows much more about a particular issue than another. When an actor is relatively ignorant about an issue, they do not have the wider background knowledge in order to compare new claims. Nor do they have an understanding of the right questions they might ask. This means they rely on relatively crude understandings of an issue yet tend to be much more certain than an expert would be (Raab, Fernbach, & Sloman, 2019).

When ignorance is noisy, uninformed actors do not simply stay silent about what they don’t know. Rather, they are compelled to speak about an issue of which they have little knowledge or understanding. A recent experimental study found that this compulsion to speak (coupled with a lack of accountability created by a ‘social pass’) was an important factor in explaining bullshitting (Petrocelli, 2018). Similar dynamics have been found in field studies. For instance, middle managers are often relatively ignorant about the work their subordinates are engaged with, but are under pressure to act as the leader by doing or say something (Alvesson & Spicer, 2016). They fall back upon generic management speak rather than engage with the people they manage in language they find meaningful. A second example is British government ministers who find themselves with a new policy portfolio (King & Crewe, 2014). Often these politicians have little or no knowledge of the new policy area, but they are under pressure to say and do something. To address this tricky situation, politicians rely on empty and often misleading language.

There also needs to be an opportunity in a speech community to use bullshit. Such an opportunity typically appears when a speech community is infused with permissive uncertainty. This is a situation where actors do not know what will happen and are willing to consider almost any knowledge that might plug this epistemic gap. They face high levels of uncertainty, yet have permissive epistemic norms which guide the problem of sorting out what to do. This creates a curious situation where almost any knowledge claim goes. When faced with a wicked problem such as a significant and unexpected environmental change, some organizations experience high levels of uncertainty but also find that different kinds of experts claim ownership over the problem (Rittel & Webber, 1973). This can create experimentation, participation and dialogue (Ferraro, Pfeffer, & Sutton, 2005). But equally, it can create multiple failures, conflict and drift. Under these circumstances, a greater sense of confusion can well up and an ‘anything goes’ approach takes hold.

The most obvious aspect involved in this kind of situation is a state of uncertainty (Fuller, 2006; Wakeham, 2017). This entails epistemic uncertainty which comes from having imperfect knowledge about the world. Epistemic uncertainty can also be generated by competing and overlapping knowledge claims which create a dense patchwork of contradictory truths, making it difficult for an actor to make a judgement about what they think is correct. In addition, people face ontological uncertainty. This comes from the fact that social reality is ‘inherently risky and always under construction’ (Fuller, 2006, p. 274). Even if an actor acquires knowledge about social reality, that social reality can shift and change. Such changeability makes it very difficult to be certain of one’s judgements.

What makes uncertainty even more difficult to deal with is permissiveness. This is created by relaxed ‘epistemic vigilance’ (Sperber et al., 2010). In some settings, relaxing one’s epistemic vigilance is a way of investing epistemic trust in another person or, at the very minimum, as a way of keeping conversation and interaction going (Sperber et al., 2010). This sets up what we might call ‘epistemic indulgency patterns’. These are similar to the industrial indulgency patterns which entail routine social interactions where an authority figure like a manager allows their subordinates to get away with otherwise banned behaviour (such as stealing materials from a factory) in exchange for compliance (Gouldner, 1954). A similar process happens with epistemic claims. This is when people are willing to indulge weak claims from others in return for indulgence of their own weak claims. When this happens, people begin to allow weak or empty claims to pass without too much scrutiny. If they were to engage in greater epistemological due diligence, then social interaction would become too costly, time-consuming and conflict inducing. These epistemic indulgency patterns allow bullshit to pass without more serious assessment.

When such epistemological indulgency patterns are paired with endemic uncertainty, it can create a confusing, yet liberating situation: no-one knows what’s happening and which bodies of knowledge they should draw on to sort things out. For instance, the process of rapid social change in the United States during the late 19th century created a great sense of uncertainty in many people’s lives. It led to the confusing multiplication of forms of knowledge and authority. This uncertainty coupled with a pluralism created an ideal setting where sham commercial ventures and questionable experts peddled their wares. In the medical field, ‘quacks’ (unlicensed doctors) outnumbered licensed doctors by three to one in many parts of the country (Janik & Jensen, 2011). Quacks offered miracle cures which had no basis in science. The market for their ‘bullshit’ cures flourished until the early 20th century when legislation reduced the permissiveness associated with medical knowledge claims. Arguably a similar process has occurred in recent years with the rise of new technologies such as artificial intelligence. These new technologies have created a great deal of uncertainty, but they have also enabled some degree of permissiveness around who is able to claim expertise in the technology. This has opened up significant space for bullshitters who talk about artificial intelligence but have little understanding of the underlying technology. This makes it not terribly surprising that a recent analysis of 2,830 ‘artificial intelligence’ start-ups in Europe found that about 40 percent of them did not use AI technology at all (MMC Ventures, 2019).

Language games

The presence of conceptual entrepreneurs, noisy ignorance and permissive uncertainty creates a speech community which is conducive to bullshitting in organizations. But bullshitting is an active process which has a game-like quality to it. This is best seen as a language game. I borrow the concept from Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958, p. 11) who used it to capture how ‘speaking a language is part of an activity, a form of life’. These language games are ‘rule-governed practice, integrating communication and action’ (Mantere, 2013, p. 6). They have characteristic moves, players, strategies and stakes. Learning how to participate in a language game enables one to make statements which are meaningful in a particular context. The example Wittgenstein gave of a language game is a group of builders communicating with one another. He explains how ‘language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words “block”, “pillar” “slab”, “beam”. A. calls them out; — B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 3). Wittgenstein goes on to explain how these four words (block, pillar, slab, beam) constitute an entire ‘primitive language’ and the builder can get things done by simply saying ‘block there’, ‘slab here’ and so on. Each of these terms (‘block’, ‘slab’ etc.) gains a meaning within the language game. Some of the other examples include forming and testing a hypothesis, making a joke, telling a story, and reporting an event (Wittgenstein, 1958, pp. 11–12). Within the context of organizations, language games can include repeating the ideas of management gurus (Astley & Zammuto, 1992), developing strategic plans (Jalonen, Schildt & Vaara, 2018; Manatre, 2013), engaging in competitive wars (Rindova, Becerra, & Contado, 2004), interacting in an online chat group (Fayard & DeSanctis, 2010), or engaging in an inquiry following a scandal (Kewell, 2006). To this list, I would add bullshitting.

At the heart of the language game of bullshitting is the act of advancing empty and misleading claims. Recent linguistic analysis has identified the components of a statement that is bullshit (Meibauer, 2016, 2018). These are assertions which (1) shows a loose concern for the truth, (2) are driven by misrepresentation of intent and (3) express undue certainty. To bullshit, an actor needs to make an assertion which displays a lack of concern for standards of truth or falsity. In addition, the intent of the statement should be misrepresented. It should not be clearly stated that the person is trying to mislead or not speak with regard to questions of truth or falsehood. Finally, a bullshit statement is typically presented with much more certainty than is warranted. This means that what are often loose conjectures are presented as certainties. An example of this can be found in a study of students at an elite high-school in the United States (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009, 2011). When required to talk with their teachers about a particular subject, the students often had not put in the required work. To do deal with this tricky situation, students would rely on a few signals of knowledge (such as a few key names or facts). The students would hide their intentions of avoiding scrutiny by feigned fascination with the topic. But most importantly, they would present themselves in an excessively confident manner. They hoped this mixture of conspicuous signals, feigned interest and extreme confidence meant they were able to get through lessons with minimal work. And typically it worked. After leaving, many of the students realized that this ability was the main thing they had learned during their time at the school. It was a skill which stood them in good stead when they took up leadership positions throughout American society.

The language game of bullshitting also entails responding to empty assertion. In particular, it involves the shallow processing of empty and misleading claims. This happens when an interlocutor who hears a bullshit claim does not engage in meaningful inquiry through questioning or exploring a claim in more depth (Fallis, 2015). They can avoid such inquiry in a range of different ways (McCarthy et al., 2020). One way is through acquiescence. This entails a passive response whereby a person faced with a bullshit statement lets it pass without any serious challenge. An example of this is when a senior figure takes the floor in a meeting and makes a series of empty and misleading statements while the audience feigns attention and offers no serious public challenge (Fleming, 2019). A second potential response is enthusiasm. This entails a more active and affirmative response whereby an actor faced with bullshit responds by joining in. For instance, during interactions with managers spouting the empty and misleading language of leadership, some professionals may respond by ‘talking the talk’ (Bresnen, Hyde, Hodgson, Bailey, & Hassard, 2015). They begin to use the language of leadership themselves (which they might personally regard as ‘bullshit’) to get the attention of their superiors. It can involve a process of one-upmanship whereby a listener responds with additional bullshit which is even more empty and more misleading than the initial offering. For instance, sailors talking in a group frequently tell increasingly tall stories about their exploits on previous voyages (Henningsen & Roberts, 1965). A third way people can respond is by believing the bullshit. This is when a person listening to a bullshitter mistakes what they are saying as being an approximation of the truth. In many language games of bullshitting, this is a sign that the listener is naïve and does not understand the game being played. For instance, in his study of hitch-hikers, Mukerji (1978) found that young and naïve hitch-hikers would often mistake the bullshitting of older hitch-hikers for truth statements. This unwarranted belief marked the young hitch-hikers out as neophytes who did not completely understand the culture and were not fully fledged participants in the game of bullshitting. A final response to bullshitting is negation. This is when someone ‘calls bullshit’ by pointing out the false or misleading nature of a statement. Calling bullshit can be an abrupt act where someone simply responds ‘that’s bullshit’ and in doing so closes down space for inquiry and justification. This kind of response can be found in online debates about political issues. In other cases, bullshit can be called in a more careful way through exploring a claim, charting out why it might be considered bullshit and what might be done to make it less bullshit. An example of this careful calling out of bullshit is Rudolph Carnap’s interrogation of Martin Heidegger’s phrase ‘the nothing nothings’ (Egan, 2018). In this important moment in the development of 20th-century philosophy, Carnap judiciously interrogated the meaning of the phrase, eventually identifying its self-referential nature.

Each of these responses is likely to have different effects on the ongoing pattern of interaction. The first two responses (acquiescence and enthusiasm) can help maintain surface-level agreement (Goffman, 1959). Through either acquiescing or enthusiastically participating, actors can keep the interaction going in a polite way. For instance, if an audience member remains relatively silent while their boss spouts bullshit, the social relationship is likely to remain intact. If an actor shows that they actually buy into bullshit and begins to mistake it for a truth claim, then it is likely they will either be sidelined from the bullshit game or given some subtle signals (either from the bullshitter or other listeners) that they should not take it so seriously. This kind of re-orienting work helps to bring the bullshitter back on track. Finally, when a listener actively calls bullshit on a speaker, it can disturb the surface-level agreement between people. The bullshitter can seek to repair this surface-level agreement through strategies such as evasive bullshitting, whereby they answer a fairly direct question with an irrelevant answer (Carson, 2010). For instance, following the financial crisis of 2008, senior executives of some of Britain’s largest banks were asked to testify in front of a committee of the UK Parliament. When the bankers were quizzed about their responsibility for the crisis, many responded with evasive bullshit. They expressed regret, claimed they had already apologized and shifted blame to others (Tourish & Hargie, 2012). This evasion had a game-like quality. The inquisitors kept asking questions aimed at establishing the veracity of claims while the bankers continued to avoid the questions. This points to a significant challenge for people calling bullshit: the effort they need to put in to refute bullshit is often of an order of magnitude greater than what is required to produce the bullshit in the first place (Brandolini, 2014). This means calling out bullshit can be an effortful and time-intensive activity that potentially harms people’s relationships, which ultimately is judged to be not worth their while.

There are moments when the social practice of bullshitting runs smoothly. This happens when bullshitters are able to continue articulating empty and misleading statements, these statements are accepted (through either acquiescence or enthusiastic embrace) and a degree of surface-level agreement is maintained. This entire process is likely to involve in situ sense-making (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020) whereby actors adjust and make changes in response to actors involved in the bullshit game. When it continues, they are able to maintain a language game where questions of truth and falsehood are not the yardstick people use to judge statements. Instead, players mobilize different criteria to judge the relative worthiness or relevance of a particular statement. For instance, Mukerji (1978) noticed that bullshitting among hitch-hikers was judged on the basis of whether it amused people. However, there was always the potential for a bullshit game to misfire. This happened if an interlocutor called bullshit and tried to drag the discussion back to criteria of truth and falsity. If this happened, then it became much more difficult for people to continue to bullshit. It also made it much more difficult for people to positively or neutrally respond to bullshitting and maintain a sense of surface agreement around the bullshit.

Identity and image

Participating in a language game is a form of identity work. It is a way of creating, maintaining and in some cases undermining how others see us, and how we see ourselves (Brown, 2015). When a language game is played competently, it can reinforce the image others have of a bullshitter and how bullshitters see themselves. When bullshitting misfires, it can undermine the image and identity of bullshitters.

Successful bullshitting enhances the image of bullshitters. This happens when bullshitters are able to more or less convincingly present themselves as more grandiose than they actually are (Alvesson, 2013). External audiences are more likely to make positive judgements about them and be more willing to invest resources in them. The link between bullshitting, favourable judgement and resourcing can be seen in a recent study of the evaluation of contemporary art. This study found that when abstract images were paired with randomly generated ‘bullshit’ titles, they were judged as being more profound than images which either had no title or a descriptive title (Turpin et al., 2019). In this context, bullshit was a low-cost strategy that encouraged evaluators to see an image as more valuable than they otherwise would. Organizations often use trendy but misleading names to attract resources (particularly from the uninformed). In recent years, firms have gained a boost in valuation by adopting a name invoking blockchain technology (Cahill, Baur, Liu, & Yang, 2020). In the late 1990s, firms gained a similar boost in value by adding ‘.com’ to their name (Cooper, Dimitrov, & Rau, 2001). In the early 1960s, firms with the suffix ‘tronics’ were perceived as being more valuable (Malkiel, 1999). Some of these firms did not actually use the technologies which their name invoked, but the title helped them to attract resources and higher valuations.

As well as enhancing one’s image, bullshitting can also help to enhance self-identity. This is because bullshit can enable bullshitters to conjure a kind of ‘self-confidence trick’ (Sturdy, Brocklehurst, Winstanley, & Littlejohns, 2006). This happens when bullshitters mislead themselves into believing their own bullshit. Research on self-deception in psychology has found that through various cognitive processes (such as selective information search, biased processing, selective remembering) people are able to focus on information which bolsters their sense of self and marginalizes any information which might undermine their sense of self (Schwardmann & Van Der Weele, 2019; Smith, Trivers, & Von Hippel, 2017; Von Hippel & Trivers, 2011). This has the advantage of limiting the cognitive load of the person making a misleading claim. Self-deception enables individuals to present themselves as much more self-confident than they would otherwise seem if they had to engage in cognitively taxing processes of dual processing (holding in one’s mind both the deceptive statement as well as the truth). The self-confidence which comes from self-deception can aid resource acquisition. For instance, entrepreneurs are encouraged to ignore their objective chances of failure so they can appear self-confident in their search for resources to support their venture. This self-confidence can make it easier to acquire the resources an entrepreneur needs, but it can also lead to delusional and potentially destructive behaviours (; Hartmann et al., 2019; Spicer, 2017, pp. 123–30).

Bullshitting doesn’t always work so smoothly. It can easily misfire. When this happens, it can lead to negative outcomes. It can undermine an actor’s identity. When others realize that an actor frequently engages in bullshitting, they may begin to mistrust them by questioning whether they are competent, benevolent and have integrity (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995). External audiences may see bullshitting as a sign that an actor does not know what he or she is doing (and is therefore incompetent), that they are immoral and do not have the best interests of others’ at heart (and is therefore malevolent), and that they are unable to do what they say they will (and therefore lack integrity). If external audiences begin to distrust a bullshitter, they are likely to punish or avoid them. Their claims can be discounted, resources can be withheld and they might be ignored entirely. A study of CEO calls with market analysts following the announcement of a merger or acquisition found that when CEOs used more management speak they were punished by the stock market with a lower pricing of the firm’s shares, irrespective of the longer-term value the M&A may create (Salvado & Vermeulen, 2018). This is because management speak led analysts to question a CEO’s motives for undertaking a merger or acquisition.

When bullshitting misfires, it can undermine how bullshitters see themselves. Failures can prompt a bullshitter to reflect on the meaningfulness of the language which they use. Reflection is likely to lead at least some players of the bullshit game to the conclusion that their chosen activity is meaningless and empty. For instance, Paulsen (2017) explored how employees in a Swedish government employment agency reacted when the organization became increasingly dominated by empty management rhetoric. As this happened, many officials found themselves doing what they regarded as socially useless and existentially meaningless work. As part of their job, they were obliged to reproduce a large stock of standardized bullshit terms. Some also sought to come up with equally vacuous and misleading explanations for the importance of their own job. As a result of this process, many employees started to see their own work as ‘bullshit jobs’.

Bullshitting is unlikely to have purely positive or negative outcomes. Positives and negatives are likely to be mixed. For instance, bullshitters could be seen as rogues who have a fine image but are untrustworthy. Similarly, those involved in bullshitting can start to see themselves as being confident but also engaged in something which is ultimately meaningless. It is also worth noting that the costs and benefits of bullshitting are not equally distributed. Often bullshitters try to externalize the identity and image costs of bullshitting onto others while enjoying the benefits. For instance, one standard move of populist politicians has been to project the lack of trust others have for them outwards onto other people or institutions.

Vicious and virtuous circles

Bullshitting can create self-reinforcing or self-undermining feedback loops. This is dependent on whether bullshitting enhances or diminishes the image and identity of the bullshitter. Such outcomes shape the extent to which bullshitters are willing to continue to engage in the language game of bullshitting as well as their likelihood of continuing to invest in and support the broader speech community which encourages bullshitting.

When bullshitting enhances an actor’s image and identity, they are likely to engage in more of it. One way they can do this is by extending the scale of their bullshitting. That means using quantitatively more empty and misleading statements when communicating about a particular issue. For instance, an organization increases the scale of bullshitting when they use more empty and misleading phrases in their advertising to consumers. A second way bullshitting might increase is through extending the scope. This is a qualitative shift whereby actors bullshit about a wider range of issues or in a wider range of forums. For instance, an organization would increase the scope of bullshitting if it had previously been bullshitting in their advertising to consumers but then also began bullshitting in communication with employees. An implication of increased scale and scope is that becoming a legitimate participant in the collective conversation also means bullshitting. Otherwise veracious people get drawn into using bullshit just so they might be seen as having a legitimate voice in their organization. Positive results from bullshitting can lead an organization to invest more into the speech community which encourages bullshitting. This means they are more likely to rely upon the management ideas industry as a source of input when making decisions, more likely to reward noisy ignorance and more likely to stoke up permissive uncertainty. Ultimately, increasing the scale and scope of bullshit and the speech community around bullshitting is likely to lead to unbounded bullshitting. This is when empty and misleading statements have few boundaries and are applied in a wide range of contexts.

When bullshit simultaneously enhances and undermines an actor’s identity and image, those actors are likely to only tactically accept further bullshitting. While they may not officially and explicitly support further bullshitting, they can unofficially tolerate some degree of it. This means bullshitting becomes a kind of public secret: something everyone knows about, but is rarely explicitly acknowledged (Costas & Grey, 2014). Bullshitting becomes a language game which is useful and potentially embarrassing. It is allowed but not officially sanctioned. While bullshitting still takes place, the scale and scope of it is unlikely to increase. While there may be ad hoc and unrevealed backing for the speech community which supports bullshitting, there is little consistent and public support for it. This means an organization might continue to draw on the services of the management ideas industry, but not in a systematic or public way. It also may implicitly allow noisy ignorance, but it does not publicly celebrate it as a virtuous form of behaviour. Finally, permissive uncertainty may be unofficially tolerated and accepted, but it is not officially condoned. Under these circumstances, we are likely to witness the emergence of a bounded form of bullshitting. This is when empty and misleading talk is used in a limited number of instances and in relation to particular issues. Bounded bullshitting involves some degree of self-policing by participants. While engaging in some bullshitting, participants typically limit themselves, thereby ensuring they are not going too far. It also means they keep an eye on other less bullshit-intensive language games which effectively act as a form of limitation and constraint.

When bullshitting undermines an actor’s image and identity, it is likely to be actively punished. Actors typically notice when bullshitting has a detrimental effect on how other groups see them. They also are likely to notice when bullshitting starts to undermine how they see themselves. When this happens, they are likely to rein in or even largely cease bullshitting. This may be difficult, particularly when bullshitting has become a routinized part of formal communication. But it is possible for people to linguistically retool. It is easier to change if there are alternative language games bullshitters can retreat into. If bullshitting is punished, actors are also likely to curtail their investment in the speech community which encourages bullshit. This means they become less reliant on the management ideas industry, they stop rewarding and tolerating noisy ignorance, and they tamper down permissive uncertainty through stricter epistemic standards.

The Rise and Fall of Bullshit

Bullshitting is a common social practice in many organizations. In the previous section, I have argued that people engage in bullshitting to participate in a speech community, to get through day-to-day interactions within that community, and to reinforce a positive image and identity of themselves. Successful bullshitting can beget more bullshitting. When this happens, what starts out as informal bullshitting can gradually become a collective routine, then part of the formal organization and end up as a sacred truth. However, bullshit can backfire. When this happens, bullshit can become self-undermining. Unsuccessful bullshitting can beget less bullshit. If this happens, what starts as sacred values can end up being revealed as bullshit. In what follows, I look at how each of these processes happens (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Escalating and De-escalating Bullshitting.

Escalating bullshit

Like many other social practices, bullshitting can be scaled up. This happens when bullshitting gradually broadens from informal improvisation to become routinized interaction and eventually becomes a sacred value.

Bullshitting often begins as an informal language game which is restricted to a small group of people. This is a typical ‘bullshit session’ in which a group of close acquaintances trade empty and misleading talk as a way of keeping social interaction going (Spicer, 2017). It is like a piece of improvised social theatre where the participants are the only audience. Just like in a theatre performance (or other fictional narrative), participants are willing to suspend their disbelief and take on a part so the performance can proceed. They are willing to put aside critical questioning and proceed as if bullshit contained some degree of truth. Once players have put aside typical criteria for assess truth claims, they need to engage in a process of interpretation. This entails understanding what is happening in a social setting where typically standards of truth might no longer apply. After developing an understanding of what is going on, a would-be bullshitter moves from being a peripheral passive participant who sits and listens to become someone who is actively involved. This requires some degree of synchronization. The bullshitter has to align their own actions and words with those of others (Hadida, Tarvainen, & Rose, 2015). Finally, a participant must try to craft a space for themselves and push the language game on by adding to it. They can do this through bricolage (Perkmann & Spicer, 2014). This entails drawing on a wider stock of cultural resources (such as the products of conceptual entrepreneurs as well as past performances of bullshit) to fashion something which both continues the bullshit session and also adds to it. This process can be seen in Layton’s (2010) study of street prostitutes in Vancouver. When she began studying these women, she realized that she had to suspend her usual skepticism about their claims if she really wanted to understand their world. Although she spent many months studying these women, she remained uncertain about when they were bullshitting her, when they were saying something truthful, and when they were outright lying. Layton found that understanding what was bullshit and what was not proved to be very difficult to determine. She lacked the deep insider knowledge required to make such judgements. As she learned more about the lifeworld of the prostitutes, she learned that truth and bullshit often were closely woven together. A good understanding of the culture enabled her to discern the ‘street wisdom’ which was often passed on through bullshitting.

Over time, improvising bullshit is likely to become a routine. One way this process of routinization happens is through learning. By repeated exposure to and use of bullshit, people become accustomed to both the script and how it should be performed. This is what happened when Cothran (1974) studied swamp dwellers in the Southern United States. She slowly learned that many shocking tales she was told about violence and murder were often little more than ‘trash talk’ which shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Over time she learned how to play her role in this trash talking as well. A second way bullshitting can become routinized is through anticipation. Anticipation involves co-ordinating future action in a way which is shaped by a feel for what will happen next (Tavory & Eliasoph, 2013). When people begin to anticipate bullshit during a social interaction, they also start to organize and act accordingly. One way is by taking prophylactic measures to protect themselves from bullshitting. For instance, increasing concerns about ‘fake news’ have led many media organizations to anticipate that at least some of the information they use will have a bullshit-like quality. Anticipating bullshit, many media companies have put in place prophylactic measures such as independent fact checkers (Graves, 2016). A third way bullshit can become a routine part of an organization is through reification. This is when a fluid and subjective process (such as a language game) starts to take on a stable, object-like quality (Fleming & Spicer, 2005). Often this happens when common, yet changeable, language becomes embodied into ‘devices’ which have an object-like quality (Martí & Gond, 2018). Some examples of such devices include assessment systems, rankings, metrics, flow charts and tick-boxes. When previous empty and misleading claims start to be embodied into these devices, they develop their own substantive reference point. They start to take on their own seemingly objective reference points. This makes what might have previously seemed to be a vacuous statement appear to have a greater degree of substance. For instance, as corporate social responsibility has developed as a management discourse, people working in the CSR industries have created a range of CSR metrics and rankings (Brès & Gond, 2014; Gond & Nyberg, 2017). These have given an objective and apparently neutral quality to what was previously seen as a relatively subjective area.

Over time, routinized bullshitting can gradually become built into the formal organization. When this happens, bullshitting become part of the official lingua franca of an organization. One way this can happen is through pseudo-theorizing. Theorization provides a more technically precise language based on analysis, empirical study and design (Maguire, Hardy, & Lawrence, 2004; Perkmann & Spicer, 2007). Pseudo-theorizing occurs when the external trappings of theorizing (such as technical experts and scientific language) is present but substantive processes of theorization are absent. One way pseudo-theorizing happens is when experts with apparently legitimate credentials are mobilized to vouch for empty and misleading ideas. This gives bullshitting a sheen of technicality, precision and rationality. This is what has happened to many ‘new age’ ideas as they have filtered into corporate life. Their mystical foundations were often obscured through the use of more technical and scientific language (Purser, 2019; Spicer, 2017). A second way this process happens is through sanctioning. This entails people in positions of authority (either within or outside the organization) deeming particular forms of bullshitting to be acceptable in important organizational forums such as official meetings, internal communications and reports. Bullshitting can be actively sanctioned through authoritative individuals modelling the use of the language themselves, bullshit being encoded in internal guides and templates, and bullshitting being passively sanctioned in organizations. Finally, bullshitting becomes formalized through publicizing. This is when bullshitting which is common inside an organization starts to be used in external communication. This is particularly important when bullshitting is either taken up in external communication by high-profile figures or spoken in the collective voice of organization. An example of the former is when a CEO begins to use empty and misleading terms which are common inside the organization in communication with important external audiences such as analysts, the media or politicians.

When bullshit has become part of the formal organization for some time, it can slowly start to seem valuable in and of itself. When this happens, bullshit can be treated as sacred. Sanctification happens when an element of secular life (such as bullshitting) is elevated, a sense of higher meaning is projected into it, and deep existential significance is invested in it (Belk, Wallendorf, & Sherry, 1989; Harrison, Ashforth, & Corley, 2009). One way bullshit can become sanctified is through individual meaning seeking. This entails individuals searching for a deeper significance to what is ultimately meaningless language. Psychologists have found that when subjects are presented with various randomly generated words, some individuals try to give these words a deep spiritual and existential significance (Pennycook et al., 2015). A second way bullshit can be sanctified is through organizations providing meaning through ideology. Organizations try to do this by drawing on what might have been empty, meaningless and highly fluid words to give them a deeper sense of existential significance. When this happens, meaningless and misleading statements become empty signifiers (Cederström & Spicer, 2014). For instance, during the 1980s, the concept of ‘quality’ inspired almost religious reverence and was used to speak about almost anything from product design to human resource policies (Xu, 1999). Finally, bullshit can become sacrilized when it is legitimated by wider institutions. This happens when meaningless terms are embedded within commonly accepted practices, rules and cognitive schemes. When this happens, what was previously bullshitting within a particular organization can begin to seem like something which is inevitable and highly valuable across an entire field. For instance, within the cultural sector in the United Kingdom, a wide range of empty terms such as ‘creativity’ began to be used by actors in increasingly reverential terms (Belfiore, 2009). When this happened the idea of creativity began to be treated as a sacred value.

De-escalating bullshit

Bullshitting doesn’t always work. In the previous section, I argued that bullshitting can misfire and undermine a bullshitter’s image and identity. When this happens, bullshit can be undermined and become a less important part of social processes. In organizational contexts, bullshitting can be undermined through four processes: failed improvisation, de-routinization, de-formalization and de-sacrilization.

One way by which nascent bullshitting de-escalates is when improvised social interaction fails. For instance, improvisation can fail when an actor doesn’t suspend their disbelief and puts aside concerns about the truthfulness of a statement to let social interaction flow. For instance, a participant in a meeting may resist being swept up in a presentation filled with management buzzwords and ask for precise understandings of how this will work operationally. When this happens, resolute disbelief can become a significant barrier to ongoing bullshitting. A second way improvisation can be undermined is through misunderstanding. This happens when an actor doesn’t fully ‘get’ that they are involved in a bullshit session. When this happens, they might mistake bullshitting for outright lies or even statements of truth. For instance, novice hitch-hikers sometimes think the tall tales of ‘old hands’ are statements of truth (Mukerji, 1978). Although this could be momentarily amusing, it often proved to be awkward. A final way that improvised bullshitting can be undermined is through linguistic incompetence. For bullshitting to work, you need to have at least some level of skill in pulling together claims. When bullshit is poorly cobbled together, the emptiness and misleading nature of much of the language is likely to spark a backlash against the bullshitter.

When bullshitting becomes part of the routine processes in an organization, it is more likely to be undermined through de-routinization. One way this happens is through unlearning. This occurs when actors consciously question the bullshit they use in an unthinking way. For instance, if a management buzzword is identified as bullshit, actors have to consciously reflect on their language and find alternatives. A second way routine bullshitting can be undermined is through anticipatory defence. This means actors who expect bullshitting will put in place prophylactic measures to protect themselves. This is what happened in the media industry. A few high-profile scandals concerning journalists making up stories led to large-scale efforts to expand routine ‘fact checking’ in news production process (Graves, 2016). A final way routinized bullshit can be interrupted is through de-reification. This is when seemingly objective categories and processes are revealed to be contingent and subjective (Berger & Pullberg, 1965). This happens during shocks or crises in an organization, when an organization comes into contact with alternative speech communities, and when outsiders disturb the existing speech community.

As well as undermining routinized bullshitting, actors can question bullshit which has been integrated into the formal structures of an organization. This happens through the process of de-formalization where what appeared as legitimate organizational processes are shown to be illegitimate. One way this process can occur is through theorizing. This is when claims which appear to have a rational gloss are subjected to deeper and more searching inquiry by experts. For instance, overblown claims about the effectiveness of a management technique may be deflated through careful empirical tracking of actual impacts. A second way bullshit can be deformalized is through de-sanctioning. This can occur when people in formal positions of leadership ‘call out’ bullshit in an organization and question its use. When this happens, organizational members are less likely to routinely bullshit. Finally, bullshit can be deformalized through public repudiation. This happens when an organization as a whole commits itself to avoiding management jargon, unnecessary acronyms and other forms of business bullshit. For instance, some organizations have adopted ‘no bullshit’ rules. Although an organization may informally continue to use some forms of bullshit, this public repudiation is likely to serve as a device people can use to effectively challenge the use of bullshit in the organization.

A final way in which bullshit can be undermined is through de-sacrilization. This entails questioning the deep emotional and moral value attributed to a particular term. De-sacrilization can be sparked by individual crises of meaning when individuals begin to recognize the meaninglessness and potential emptiness associated with bullshit. Such existential explorations are likely to be sparked by periods of reflection or intense experiences which call into question deeply held values. An example of this process is when individuals going through career transitions have to question their existing values and begin to see what they once thought of as sacred as ‘bullshit’. De-sacrilization can also take place when organizations systematically undermine the meaning associated with a particular bullshit vocabulary. This occurs when there are systematic and collective attempts to highlight the lack of meaning or potential emptiness in a particular vocabulary. For instance, organizations engaged in a significant change process might highlight the empty nature of what had previously been seen as very meaningful language. Finally, vocabulary can be de-institutionalized by field-level actors. An example of this is when a particular management fad is called into disrepute across an entire field and starts to be treated as ‘bullshit’.

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